Is there something unusual about the pace and nature of technological changes? The notion that our 21^stcentury world is one of the accelerating advances is so dominant that it seems churlish to challenge it. It is a prima facie that software and its development environment are two sides of the same coin. Undoubtedly, for developing any software, the development environment plays a vital role. It acts as a kernel and all the development revolves around it.

Let’s explore and unleash the feature rich Tizen development environment, known as Tizen Studio. It comprises of comprehensive set of tool chains, intuitive IDE, a powerful emulator, numerous sample codes for developing Tizen native, web, hybrid and IoT applications. Also, it comes with necessary documentation that you need to get hands on with it.

Disambiguation: The abbreviation IDE is also used to refer to integrated drive electronics.

Tizen Studio: The origin   

The Linux Foundation announced the Tizen project in September 2011. Tizen emerged from the Linux-based platforms such as MeeGo and LiMo. The platform embraces the latest technical stack and other web-centric technologies to provide a robust and unified experience across multiple devices. It is the only platform that has the characteristics such as openness, standard based, cross architecture, scalable, and has vast experience. 

The main features of Tizen Studio are as follows:

1 Multi-platform Ecosystem Development

Tizen Studio is built from ground-up to enable developers to create compelling multi-platform applications that take full advantage of heterogeneity in terms of supported devices.Tizen Studio features a set of packages, unified APIs, and a powerful IDE that simplifies the multi-profile application development for device profiles such as:

•  Wearable
•  TV
• IoT
• Mobile and much more.

With utmost flexibility provided by Tizen Studio, easily manage the packages for a particular profile and start multi-platform application development. It is also easy to use and implement the unified APIs that interact with hardware such as the camera, media library, file storage, and GPS.

Current world is moving towards the age of connectedness and smartness, and the Internet of Things (IoT) market is booming. Tizen Studio is more focussed towards the developer niche and their mindshare is highly considered. As a result, Tizen Studio extends full support towards the easy and the comprehensive development in IoT domain.

Seamlessly start creating IoT applications – thanks to the availability of an extensive collection of the templates that come as samples with Tizen Studio. These samples let you get started quickly and with ease.

2 Simplified App Packaging

Tizen Studio is a standard-based development environment, and for app packaging, it follows the universally accepted W3C standards. 

• Tizen Studio compiles the code along with any data and resource files into a TPK file, which is an archive file with a .tpk or .wgt suffix. TPK is the official publishing format of the Tizen apps.
• The TPK file contains all the contents of a Tizen app and is the file that Tizen powered devices use to install the app.
• Tizen apps are packaged according to the W3C widget packaging specification, just as the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) mandated.  The packaging offers an efficient way to build and release your app and lets you deliver a great application experience in smaller sizes.
• An IoT application is no different and can be developed using Tizen Studio. For instance, an app developed in Tizen Studio for wearable gadgets is a hallmark of IoT applications or probably is one of the earliest industries to have deployed IoT at its service.

          The types of applications that you can develop using Tizen Studio are as follows:

Web Application

Tizen Studio supports developing web apps based on HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. 

• A web application is packaged into the .wgt package format.  
• The .wgt package is a Zip archive file containing the following files and directories

Native Application

Tizen Studio supports developing the native apps using C, C++, and the Tizen native APIs.

• A native application is packaged into the .tpk package format.
• The TPK package is a Zip file, which contains the following predefined directories and files:

                                                           

Hybrid Application

Tizen Studio also supports the hybrid application packages, which are typically composed of a web application providing the UI and one or more native apps, which take care of background services. 

• A typical hybrid application package is a Zip file with a .wgt file extension, similar to the web application package. 
• The content of the package is a combination of a web application package and a native application package, and the following are the predefined directories and files:

                                                

3 Resilient Debugger

Getting errors, not able to find the logic errors, Tizen studio got you covered with a robust debugger. Tizen Studio provides many debugging tools and views grouped in the Debug option to help you as a developer to debug effectively and efficiently. As expected, the Tizen Studio debugger lets you inspect your program for possible errors. Exceptions also result (mostly) in useful stack traces while debugging.

In the Tizen context, when you debug your app, it usually means that you are running the application with the debugger attached (that is, in debugger mode). When you do this, the debugger provides many ways to see what your code is doing while it runs. You can step through your code and look at the values stored in variables, you can set watches on variables to see when values change, and you can examine the execution path of your code too.

  Tizen Studio provides the following tools for enhanced and effective debugging tasks:

• Log Viewer
• Web Inspector
• JavaScript Analyser

For detailed instructions on debugging, see the Debugging Applications page.

4 Powerful & Fast Emulator

The Tizen Studio packs very powerful and all-inclusive emulators. You can think of the Tizen Emulator as a strict implementation of the Tizen specification, matching the features of a real Tizen reference device. The Tizen Emulator is based on the open-source QEMU project. You will probably use the Emulator Manager, which is integrated into the Tizen Studio and can be launched from the Emulator Manager icon. Using the Emulator Manager, easily customize the settings of the Tizen virtual machine. The emulator lets prototyping, developing and testing Tizen applications without using a physical device.

5 Standard Build Mechanism

The Tizen Studio build system compiles app resources and source code, and packages them into TPKs or WGTs that you can test, deploy, sign, and distribute. Tizen Studio uses the GCC compiler for the compilation of the source code. GCC compiler supports multiple languages compilation, but the GCC compiler lacks the capability of combining several source files into a non-trivial, running program.  You need at least two invocations of GCC (compile and link) to create even the simplest of applications, and the sequence of invocations is taken care of by the GCC make tool.

The build tool “make” invokes the compiler (which is GCC in our case) in a particular sequence to compile multiple sources and link them together. It also tracks dependencies between various source files and object files that result from the compilation of sources and does only the operations on components that have changed since the last build.

Build Modules are as follows:

• Make Module:  Compiles all source files in the selected module that are modified since the last build and all modules the selected module depends on recursively. The compilation includes dependent source files and any associated build tasks. You can select the module to build by selecting either the module name or one of its files in the Project window.
• Make Project:  Delete Table Makes all modules.
• Clean Project:  Deletes all intermediate/cached build files.
• Rebuild Project:  Runs Clean Project for the selected build variant and produces a TPK.